Are you a small business owner without a budget for a graphic designer? These helpful tools will help you bring your visual A game into your digital and print branding, even if you don’t have Photoshop!
They say a picture is worth a thousand words; it may also be worth a thousand retweets. For small and mid-size businesses, a graphic designer isn’t always in the budget, which is why we’re in love with Canva – a free service where anyone can make branded cover photos, infographics, flyers, invitations, email marketing and images for posts.
Once you check out these statistics on how visual content drives social media engagement, you’ll be quick to put aside some time to master your own graphic design.
After you quickly create a free account, Canva offers you dimensions for most of your marketing needs – from email headers and Etsy banners to Facebook ads and menus. You can even design your wedding invitations using this free graphic design tool! If you don’t see the dimension you’re looking for (LinkedIn Company Page Banners are noticeably missing), you can click ‘use custom dimensions’ and start creating at any width or height.
You’ll see an array of eye-catching templates on the left hand side, some of which are marked free, that you can choose from before you build up to creating your own designs from scratch. Along with paid templates that you have 24 hours to edit, you can also use Canva’s search bar to find affordable stock photography to use in your design. You can also upload your own images, branding and logos.
While the search function is very basic, try tacking the word ‘free’ onto your searches and see if you can find what you need. The library of images and graphics includes
- Grids – to pop photos into a collage quickly and efficiently
- Frames – these are growing everyday, and are like templates themselves
- Shapes – perfect for anything from infographs to valentine cards
- Lines – tons of different designs, though a little frustrating to resize
- Illustrations – graphics to add to any image
- Icons – from social media logos to lightening bolts
- Photos – a huge range of stock photography, mostly paid
- Charts – beautiful ways to turn your data visual
You’ll soon master transparency, line spacing, custom html color codes and more – especially if you go to Canva’s online Design School and make your way through their free graphic design tool tutorials!
